Down These Strange Streets

a bit of a quirk to his mouth.

“One thing I can tell you,” the investigator said. “This thing burned hot.”

“Heavy accelerants? I can’t smell anything.”

“Right, gasoline or diesel you usually can. But damned if I can prove it yet, maybe with the lab work . . . I’d say yes, though. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if it wanted to burn. There’s no sign it started in one place and spread. Everything capable of combining with oxygen just went up all at once, whoosh. The cutlery melted, and that’s a lot hotter than your typical house fire.”

The building had been a little two-story apartment house, one up and one down. This wasn’t far off Canyon Road and the strip of galleries and was close to the Acequia Madre, the ancient irrigation canal, which meant it had been fairly expensive. But not close enough to be real adobe, which in Santa Fe meant old and pricey. Brown stucco pseudo-pueblo-Spanish-style originally over frame, like nearly everything in town that stayed on the right side of the building code.

Alice had worked with him before. She was a bit older than he—midthirties—and always looked tired, her blond hair short and disorderly. He liked the way she never let a detail slip by, no matter how hard she had to work at it.

“Santa Fe, where prestige is a mud house on a dirt road,” she quoted. “So it’s not likely an insurance torch. Not enough money here.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t afford this either. When it was still there. It must have gone up like a match head.”

There wasn’t enough left to tell any more details. There was a heavy wetash smell where bits and blackened pieces rested on the scorched concrete pad of the foundation. He blinked again. That smell, and the way the bullets had chewed at the mud brick below the window, flecking bits of adobe into his face. The way his armor had chafed, the fear as he made himself jerk up over the sill and aim the M-4, laying the red dot, the instant when the mouj had stared at him wide-eyed just before the burst tracked across his body in a row of black-red dots and made him dance like a jointed doll . . .

“Eric?” Alice said, jarring him out of the memory.

“Sorry,” he said. “Deep thought.”

She spared him any offensive sympathy and he nodded to her in silent gratitude, still feeling a little shaky. Got to get over this. I can have flashbacks later.

“Let me have the workup when you can,” he said.

Of course, when I was on the rock pile I said I’d deal with it later, when it wouldn’t screw the mission. This is later, I suppose.

“I’ll zap it to your notepad,” Alice said. “I’ve got to get some more samples now.”

He turned away. Cesar Martinez was talking to the Lopez family, minus the three children who were with some neighbor or relative; the couple were sitting in one of the emergency vans, and someone had given them foam cups of coffee. His own nose twitched at the smell, though what he really wanted was a drink. Or a cigarette. He suppressed both urges and listened to his partner’s gentle voice, calm and sympathetic. He was a hotshot, and he’d go far; he was good at making people want to help him, soothing them, never stepping on what they had to say.

“I was going to go back in. They were gone, and I was going to go back in and then—”

Cesar made a sympathetic noise. “You were having dinner when the man forced you out of the house?”

“Takeout Chinese, from Chow’s,” the wife said. Her husband took up the thread:

“And this man came in. He had a gun . . . a gun like a shotgun, but smaller, like a pistol,” Anthony Lopez said. “It still looked pretty damn big. So was he.”

He chuckled, and Salvador’s opinion of him went up. It was never easy for civilians when reality crashed into what they thought had been their lives.

“How could you tell it was a shotgun?”

“Two barrels. Looked like tunnels.”

“And the man?”

“He was older than me—fifty, sixty, gray hair cut short, but he was moving fast. He had blue eyes, sort of tanned skin but you could tell he was pink?”

“Anglo, but weathered?”

“Right. And he was dressed all in black, black leather. And he shouted at us, just Go, go, go, get out, run, keep running. We did.”

“Exactly the right thing to do,” Cesar said.

“But I was going to go back. Then it burned . . .” he whispered. “If I had—”

You’d be dead, Salvador thought. On the other hand, if the guy hadn’t run you all out, you’d all be dead. There’s something screwy here. Arsonists don’t care who gets hurt and they certainly don’t risk getting made to warn people.

Mrs. Lopez spoke again. “There was a younger man outside, when we ran out. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, with his hands in the air, almost like he was high or something. And there was a, a van or a truck over there.”

She pointed to the wall of the compound across the street from what had been her house. Salvador made a note to see if they could get tire tracks.

“When we were across the street the younger man sort of, oh, collapsed. The older man with the gun, the one in black, helped him over to the van, not carrying him but nearly, sort of dragging him and putting him in the backseat. Then they drove off.”

Cesar tapped at his notepad and called up the face-sketch program.

“The younger man looked like this?” he began, and patiently ran them through the process of adjustment.

Salvador stared, fascinated as always, watching the image shift, slowly morphing and changing and then switching into something that only an expert could tell from a photograph of a living person. He knew that in the old days you’d had to use a sketch artist for this, but now it was automatic. It would even check the final result against the databases with a face-recognition subsystem. When they’d given all the help they could, Cesar went on:

“Thank you, thank you both. We may have to talk to you again later.”

He blew out a sigh and turned and leaned back against the end of the van, looking at the notepad in his hand. Salvador prompted him:

“Their stories were consistent?”

“Yeah, jefe. Right from the start, it wasn’t just listening to each other and editing the memory.”

He touched the screen. “Okay, sequence: When Mrs. Lopez got home with the kids, around five, Ellen Tarnowski’s car, she’s the upper-floor tenant, was there. Mr. Lopez, the husband, got home a little later and noticed it too. Because she’s usually not back from work by then.”

“They friends with her?”

“They know her to talk to, just in passing. Said she was nice, but they didn’t have much in common.”

The senior detective grunted and looked at his notepad, tapping for information; Mr. and Mrs. Lopez were a midlevel state government functionary and a dental hygienist respectively. Ellen Tarnowski . . .

Works at Hans & Demarcio Galleries. Okay, artsy. God knows we’ve got enough of them around here.

There were three-hundred-odd galleries in Santa Fe, plus every other diner and taco joint had original artwork on the walls and on sale. Half the waiters and checkout clerks in town were aspiring artists of one sort or another too, like the would-be actors in L.A. She looked out at him, a picture from some website or maybe the DMV: blond, midtwenties, full red lips, short straight nose, high cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Something in those eyes too, an odd look. Kind of haunted. The figure below . . .

“Jesus.”

“Just what I said. Anyway, she comes downstairs just after Mr. Lopez arrives. Mrs. Lopez looks out the kitchen window and notices her because she’s wearing—”